I’m sitting in my car directly beneath the marquee of what once was our theater. Despite the fact that around fifteen years ago someone chose to cover the marquee — like a badly iced cake — in beige stucco, Although it’s been forty years, I can blink my eyes and see the steel tracks that used to run around three sides, and the erratically flickering ﻿﻿St George Theater﻿﻿ in curved neon centered above.

My original intent today was to get a cappuccino. The space to the right of the theater — a failing barbershop when the marquee still had its tracks — is now a coffee bar. I’m waiting in my car beneath a red NO PARKING ANYTIME sign, just long enough for the barista to make my double shot. When it’s ready, she gives me the signal. I dash in, slap a five dollar bill on the counter, grab my drink and run back to the car. I’m late to leave for my next appointment, but sitting beneath the marquee for even a brief time is a kind of transport, like falling down a mine-shaft in time. I sip my coffee and tumble.

It’s 1976. Jim, a senior usher, is teetering on a 15-foot ladder on the uphill side of the marquee. A dangerous wind threatens him, as he tries to keep his balance while hanging that most fragile of items, black-painted aluminum marquee letters. It’s Tuesday night. A new movie starts on Wednesday. It’s Jim’s job to spell out, “The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea,” for all to see. It’s an impossibly long title. He has to substitute an upside-down m for the W, and two capital i’s for the L’s. We inherited our incomplete set of letters — and not much else — from the previous theater manager, who pulled out in the dead of night. At least he left us the means, more or less, to spell out the names of the movies that would break our hearts, week after week, failing, one title at a time, to fill our cavernous auditorium. A gust of wind causes the ladder to sway, and Jim drops a precious capital G. There is no sound quite like the sound of breaking cast aluminum, a surprisingly brittle material. Almost like glass but not quite. What’s a substitute for G?

I shake myself back to the present, press the button that starts my 2014 Volvo, and pull out from under the marquee’s shadow.

I’ve been thinking about Roots lately. I’m one of a minority of Americans alive in 1977, who failed to watch even a single episode of the mini-series when it was broadcast over eight gripping nights. I couldn’t watch it; I had a failing theater to run. Based on Alex Haley's best-selling novel, Roots followed several generations of enslaved African Americans, beginning with the capture of a young man in West Africa, Kunta Kinte. Roots changed the way many white Americans thought about slavery, while at the same time legitimizing the family chronicles of many black families. Despite the fact that I missed the experience of viewing it as it aired, it affected my life — and the business I was failing at — profoundly.

Television, ironically, achieved over the course of those eight nights what we in our grand old movie palace had failed to do. We’d been trying to bring our white suburban and black urban audiences together under one wide dome to watch movies — not an easy feat in a neighborhood many white people were afraid to drive through. It didn’t help that, after winter set in, our beloved St. George Theater had no heat, thanks to a landlord who was actively trying to evict us. Then, in that most desperate winter — from January 23 through January 30, while Roots aired — we were for the first time completely vacant. Our scant winter audience, those few brave souls accustomed to sitting in their hats and coats in a cold auditorium, had stayed home in front of their own televisions.

VCRs existed, but they were toys of the rich, so when a program aired, you watched it — or missed it. And everyone knew that Roots was not to be missed, a game-changing event. The last night set a nationwide Nielsen Ratings record for the largest audience ever to view a televised show. That record would not be bested until 1983, when M*A*S*H aired for the last time. Roots was obviously the ultimate triumph of television over movies, that had been coming for some time, but it was much larger. Except for me, the managers and skeleton crews of other theaters, and whoever else was unlucky enough to work nights, everyone watched, as the forbidden story of slavery unfolded. A scandal some years later, would call into question some of the details of Haley’s tale; was it fiction or non-fiction? But inaccurate or not, it was a story that needed to be told. I was glad, the morning after each of those eight nights, to hear our staff, black and white boys and girls who loved and trusted one another, buzzing about Roots.

Author

Victoria Hallerman is a poet and writer, the author of the upcoming memoir, Starts Wednesday: A Day in the Life of a Movie Palace, based on her experience as a movie palace manager of the St. George Theatre, Staten Island, 1976. As she prepares her book manuscript for publication, she shares early aspects of theater management, including the pleasures and pain of entrepreneurship. This blog is for anyone who enjoys old movie theaters, especially for those who love the palaces as they once were. And a salute to those passionate activists who continue to save and revive the old houses, including the St. George Theatre itself. This blog is updated every Wednesday, the day film always arrived to start the movie theater week.